Scott Williams - The Pulse

“I’m okay with that too, I just don’t know about going to some cabin in Mississippi,” Jessica said. “And what about Joey? If I go, can he come too?”

“Of course,” Grant said.

“If he would even want to,” Jessica added.

“He may stop by here looking for you before he goes home tonight,” Casey told her. “Why don’t you leave him a note telling him we’ll be at Grant’s place and that he can find us there?”

They locked the door to the apartment at dusk, slipping a small piece of paper with Grant’s address in the crack just above the deadbolt, where Joey couldn’t miss it. Jessica and Casey had both emptied their backpack/book bags and stuffed them with as many items of clothing as they could possibly jam inside without breaking the zippers. The groceries were still tied on the bikes in the plastic bags. They walked them on campus, to the bike rack near the theater where Jessica had left her bike the day before. Grant’s place was an efficiency apartment in back of a house on Freret Street, so after a short ride of a few blocks they were there.

“Wow, you’ve got some cool stuff in here,” Casey said after Grant let them into his apartment and lit up the living room with a battery-powered Coleman lantern he dug out of a closet.

“Thanks. It’s mostly stuff I traded for during summer field study in Guyana. These things are all that made it home. A lot of the artifacts I shipped got lost, or more likely stolen, somewhere along the way.”

“What were you studying?” Jessica asked as she looked around the room at the collection of carved wooden drums, masks, blowguns, and bows and arrows hanging from every wall.

“Grant is an anthropology grad student,” Casey explained. “I forgot that I hadn’t told you. He spent three months last summer in the Amazon jungle.”

“Actually it was in the highlands of Guyana, not in the Amazon Basin,” Grant said. “I was working on a project our department is conducting among an indigenous tribe called the Wapishana on the upper reaches of the Kamoa River.”

“That’s crazy,” Jessica said. “Do those people still use this stuff? Are they cannibals or something?”

Grant laughed. “No, they’re not cannibals, but they’re still mostly naked. And yes, they do use primitive tools and maintain most of their ancestral ceremonies. They are true hunter-gatherers, and really don’t need anything but what the rainforest provides.”

“Hunters? That’s just wrong!” Jessica said. “Why do they still do that? I thought the jungle was full of tropical fruit and stuff.”

“It is, but not enough to live on and get a balanced diet. They eat everything the forest provides, from the smallest insects and fish, to monkeys, snakes, wild pigs…you name it.”

“It must have been an awesome experience staying in their villages and seeing how they live,” Casey said, before Jessica and Grant could get into an argument about the ethics of eating animals.

“It was quite the experience, but this particular subgroup of the tribe has such a nomadic way of life they don’t even live in villages. That’s one reason we know so little about them. Our department is the first group of anthropologists to study them. Their first contact with the outside world was just in 1995. Anyway, there’ll be time to tell you more about it later, if it doesn’t bore you to death. I need to sort out some stuff and we need to talk about a plan, that is, if you two are still in with me after seeing all my jungle headhunter gear.”

Casey and Jessica waited while Grant pulled a large duffel bag out of the same closet where he had gotten the lantern. He said it was the gear that he took on the jungle expedition and also occasionally used for weekend canoe camping on the river near his parent’s cabin.

“The problem is, we can’t carry all this stuff on the bikes, plus the food and water we’re going to need for the trip. I can carry much more on mine, since I’ve got a rack on it and it’s a lightweight bike anyway, but you two are going to have a hard enough time just pedaling those heavy clunkers you have even without any weight.”

“Can’t we just wear our backpacks?” Casey asked.

“Yeah, but it’s not ideal. If you keep them light with just your clothes and things like that, I suppose it will have to do. But too much weight that high up will wear you out and keep you off balance. It’s better to let the bike carry the weight. I think if you both carry your clothes in your packs and we strap some of the lighter, bulkier stuff like sleeping bags on the handlebars and under the seats, I can manage everything else we need.”

“Didn’t you say the cabin would have everything we need?” Jessica asked.

“Yes, but we can’t head out on a trip that far and count on getting there in a certain length of time. A lot of factors could delay us, considering what has happened, so we need to be prepared to be as self-sufficient on the road as possible.”

“I would have never thought like that,” Casey said. “I guess that comes from what you learned in the jungle, huh?”

“Just travel in general. I learned more from my parents than from anywhere else. We were always on the move, it seems. I learned that real travel, not the tourist stuff, requires flexibility in your thinking and the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. We’re not going to be tourists. If we go anywhere while the grid is down, we’ll be travelers, and we had better be ready for anything.”

THE ARRIVAL OF IBIS in the harbor at Charlotte Amalie brought most of the occupants of the other vessels near her mooring to their decks to wave and shout questions to the newcomers. Most simply wanted to know from where the two men in the schooner had sailed, and what they had seen or heard of the bizarre flash in the northern sky that was the first sign of the series of events that took out communications, the power grid, and most forms of transportation. Artie was still reeling from days and nights of constant motion, and felt his body still compensating despite the calm of the harbor in which Ibis floated peacefully, tethered to her mooring without rolling, pitching, or bobbing. He fought to steady himself while Larry was busy securing the sails and sorting out lines. When asked how far to the southeast of St. Thomas they’d been when they saw the flash, Artie replied with the numbers of the last coordinates the GPS had displayed before it lost satellite reception. These were numbers he would never forget, as they marked the point where Larry began navigating by dead reckoning.

“We have no way of knowing how Martinique might have been affected,” Larry added after saying that those coordinates from when the event occurred put them over a hundred nautical miles from their departure point.

They were directing most of their answers to an older couple aboard a sleek, 50-odd-foot sailing yacht of modern design, with immaculate white topsides and polished metal fittings that indicated it was nearly new and well maintained. This boat, with the name Celebration displayed on her stern above the hailing port of Norfolk, VA, was the nearest vessel to Ibis , and the owners lost no time introducing themselves as Pete and Maryanne Buckley, inviting them to come aboard for a cup of coffee and more conversation.

“Our dinghy’s already in the water,” Pete said. “I’ll come pick you up.”

Pete rowed the rigid-bottomed inflatable alongside Ibis, explaining that the EFI-equipped 25-horsepower Honda outboard on the stern hadn’t started since the power surge.

“It’s not just the dinghy motor either,” Pete said. “We’re pretty much dead in the water. Celebration is just too dependent on high-tech equipment. But oh, wow! What a beauty you guys are on! She looks like you just sailed her in from an era before all this stuff was needed.”